Thursday, July 9, 2015

Just
as Bertrand Russell, the famed British philosopher, mathematician,
historian, polymath, activist, and Nobel
Prize Winner in Literature, had
hoped the name of his pal Albert
Einstein helped attract a big crowd to the press briefing in London announcing
the latest assault on the nuclear arms
race. Einstein, the most famous scientist since Isaac Newton, had died on April 18, 1955 just days after signing
the document that the two had been collaborating on for more than a year.

Now
on July 9 of the same year the planned press
conference at Caxton Hall had to
be moved three times from a small meeting
room, to a large conference room,
and finally to the Great Hall as journalists from Great Britain and around the world flocked to hear the
announcement. By in large, it was, at
first, a hostile crowd already
writing stories with an egghead/pacifist/traitor
slant in their heads. Then the 3rd Earl Russell stepped to the microphones and began his introduction of
the Russell-Einstein Manifesto,
which had also been co-signed by nine
other world class intellectuals, all
but one of them like Einstein and Russell, were or would become Nobel Laureates.

After
his introduction Russell began:

I am bringing the warning pronounced by the signatories to the notice of
all the powerful Governments of the world in the earnest hope that they may
agree to allow their citizens to survive.

Despite all of the care and time taken to perfect the
final wording of the Manifesto, it was straight
forward and clear on its message and
call to action. The existential
threat to the survival of humanity
by the development, spread, deployment,
and likely use of the weapons of mass
destruction—the first use of that term—made their limitation and ultimate the
concern of all people and not just the belligerent
powers in possession of them. It
proposed a world conference of scientists and intellectuals of all nationalities
to be held at a neutral location to
discuss the situation and propose solutions. Invitations were extended also to all governments who were exhorted to “Remember
your humanity, and forget the rest.”

Bertrand Russell at the press announcement for the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.

At the end of his statement,
the early barrage of questions from
the press was quite hostile. But
Russell, noted not only for his simple eloquence
as a speaker, but for the clear lucidity
of his arguments, calmly responded and won most of the reporters over. The results were almost unanimously positive
coverage in the news columns of even
conservative and nationalistic publications.

Joseph Rotblat—Polish/British
physicist, only scientist with the Manhattan Project to develop and American atomic bomb who resigned out of conscience, specialist in the
effects of fall-out, Nobel Peace
Prize, 1995.

Such a powerful brain trust, missing only the leading
scientists working on the American and Soviet
nuclear weapons programs, was hard
to ignore.

The road to
establishing the international conference was bumpy. Russell had long had a close relationship
with members of the Indian Congress
Party—he had a close working relationship with future Indian Defense Minister V. K. Krishna Menon,
the long-time head of the India League in
Britain. Menon, the architect of what
would become known as the movement of unaligned
nations as a third force in world affairs, helped secure an
invitation from Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru to host the proposed conference in New Delhi. Such a location
would have boosted both the conference’s vaunted neutrality and India’s status
as the leader of the emerging Third
World and unaligned movement. But
the 1956 Egyptian closure of the Suez Canal and subsequent crisis in an
era when many of the European delegates would have still sailed rather than
flown to India scrubbed those plans.

The Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis,
of all people, offered to finance the conference in Morocco but suspicions about his motivation let Russell and his
associates to turn him down.

Immediately after
the original press conference Canadian
financier and philanthropist was
so enthused by the Manifesto that he offered to fund and host the conference at
his personal retreat in Pugwash, Nova
Scotia. Russell returned to that
offer after his other difficulties.

Scientists in attendance at the first Pugwash Conferance.

The first PugwashConference on Science and World Affairs convened in July 1957 with
22 top scientists representing 9 countries—the U.S., Soviet Union, Japan, the
United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Austria, and Poland. No national
governments sent official representatives, although the Russian, Chinese, and
Poles could not have attended without their governments’ explicit approval and
support. The relatively remote location
discouraged attendance by other noted supporters of the movement and Russell
himself was too ill to attend. His closest associate in the creation and
planning of the conference, Joseph Rotblatwas elected as Secretary General of
the on-going Pugwash Conference international organization.

The Conference
declared its main objective purpose as and methods as:

…the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction
(nuclear, chemical and biological) and of war as a social institution
to settle international disputes. To
that extent, peaceful resolution of
conflicts through dialogue and mutual understanding is an essential part of
Pugwash activities, that is particularly relevant when and where nuclear
weapons and other weapons of mass destruction are deployed or could be used…The
various Pugwash activities (general
conferences, workshops, study groups, consultations and special
projects) provide a channel of
communication between scientists, scholars, and individuals experienced in
government, diplomacy, and the military for in-depth discussion and
analysis of the problems and opportunities at the intersection of science and
world affairs. To ensure a free and frank exchange of views, conducive to the
emergence of original ideas and an effective communication between different or
antagonistic governments, countries and groups, Pugwash meetings as a rule are
held in private. This is the main modus operandi of Pugwash. In addition to
influencing governments by the transmission of the results of these discussions
and meetings, Pugwash also may seek to make an impact on the scientific community
and on public opinion through the holding of special types of meetings and
through its publications.

Although the
activities of the Pugwash Conference were not well known to the general public,
it proved quite influential in a number of ways in the turbulent and dangerous Cold War years that followed. Pugwash played a useful role in opening
communication channels during a time of otherwise-strained official and
unofficial relations. It provided background and technical work to the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Non-Proliferation Treaty of1968, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972,
the Biological Weapons Convention in
the same year, and the Chemical Weapons
Convention of 1993. Former US Secretary
of Defense Robert McNamara acknowledged that a backchannel Pugwash initiative
laid the groundwork for the negotiations
that ended the Vietnam War. Mikhail
Gorbachev admitted the influence of the organization on him as leader of the
Soviet Union. Pugwash was credited with being a groundbreaking and innovative transnational organization and a
leading example of the effectiveness of Track
II diplomacy.

Despite these
successes, the U.S. government frequently publicly accused the Pugwash
Conference of being a Soviet Front
organization, which it always vigorously denied. Rotblat in a 1998 Bertrand Russell Lecture said that that there were a few
participants in the conferences from the Soviet Union “who were obviously sent
to push the party line, but the
majority were genuine scientists and behaved as such.” Independent modern scholars of the movement
confirm that view.

Rotblat and the
Pugwash Conference were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in
1994. The Conference continues its work
to this day with offices in Rome, London,
Geneva, and Washington and independent, supportive Pugwash groups in more than
50 countries.

Aside from the
creation of the Pugwash Conference, the Russell-Einstein Manifestohad a significantimpact on public opinion, particularly
in Britain where it, and the ongoing activities of Russell and others, inspired
the Ban the Bomb movement which
reached to status of a mass movement involving both huge demonstration and acts of civil
disobedience. Similar movements
sprang up in the United States but were constrained by the oppressive and
lingering shadow of the Red Scare from
becoming so wide-spread. But the anti-nuclear
movement proved to be an important
springboard in the mid-Sixties for
a wider American peace movement and
opposition to the Vietnam War.

Interestingly,
before the Manifesto both Einstein and Russell had complex and sometimes
contradictory histories with atomic and nuclear weapons.

Einstein
first heard from refugee scientists Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Eugene
Wigner about the feasibility of an atomic weapon—something he had never previously considered—and
warnings that the Nazis were already
in theearly stages of research and
development. Alarmed, Einstein wrote his
famous letter to President Franklin D.
Roosevelt in August of 1939 alerting him to the dangers. This is widely viewed as the impetus for the
creation of the Manhattan Project.
Although Einstein, a pacifist, to
no active part in the development of the Bomb, after the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was guilt
ridden by his role. Hededicated much of the rest of his life
to opposition to nuclear arms.

Russell was
born in 1872 into one of the most aristocratic and liberal families in
Britain. He early rose to prominence as
a mathematician and logician but was
best known to the public as a socialist—an
associate of Sydney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw in the Fabian
Society—and as a pacifist. Unlike many British socialists and
pacifists, he did not abandon his anti-war stance during World War I.

He was a
prominent critic of the war and led demonstrations against it resulting in him
being sacked fromTrinity College following his conviction under the Defense of the Realm Act. He played a prominent role in the Leeds Convention of 1917, a gathering
of thousands of anti-war socialists and radical
members of the Liberal Party. His speech to the convention drew a huge ovation and was widely reported in the
press, making him as an enemy of the state.
When he refused to pay a £100 fine under the Defense of the Realm act in
a particularly vindictive action against a scholar with significant other
assets, all of his books were seized and put up for sale. Most were bought by friends and returned to
him. Latter in the war after giving a speech
against pressure on the United States to join the war, Russell was jailed at Brixton Prison for six months during
which time he wrote one of his most important scholarly books, Introduction
to Mathematical Philosophy.

Russell depicted in his World War I Brixton Prison.

In 1920, despite his war time opposition to the war
Prime Minister David Lloyd George appointed
Russell to a 24 member delegation sent to the Soviet Union to
investigate the effects of theRussian Revolution.
Most of the delegates went there, like Russell, generally supportive of
the Revolutionary regime when they went.
But an hour private meeting with VladimirLenin, who he found to be “impishly
cruel” and very like an arrogant “opinionated professor, Russell began to have
his doubts. Despite being carefully shepherded on a tour by Communist
functionaries, Russell carefully observed the conditions he found without preconceived notions. He noted an underlying fear in the population
almost everywhere he went and he believed loud pops he heard in the night were executions.
His companions insisted they were simply car back-fires. Of course
Russell was right. The rest of the
delegation returned with glowing reviews of the workers’ paradise. Russell
became one of the first leftist critics of the Soviet Union in the west and
wroteThe Practice and Theory of Bolshevism.
When accused of being a traitor by the British left, he insisted that he
remained a socialist, but not an authoritarian.

Through the Twenties and Thirties, Russell
continued to be active in pacifist causes and in promoting disarmament. He stepped up his criticism of the Soviet
Union, particularly after the beginning of the Stalinist show trials. But
he was equally alarmed by the rise of the Nazis. He marched and spoke against both, seeing no contradiction
in it just as he marched and spoke against British brutality in India. It was all one in the same to him.

But by 1940 Russell came to the conclusion that the
Nazis were by far the greatest threat.
He reluctantly publicly abandoned absolute pacifism and gave conditional
support to the war against Germany. By
1943 he had formulated what he called Practical
Political Pacifism concluding that war is always an absolute evil but that under extreme circumstances it might be the
lesser of two evils.

When the U.S. dropped atomic weapons on Japan,
Russell immediately grasped their threat to humanity. He was also concerned with the rise of the
Soviet Union to what we would now call a super
power likely to dominate Europe. He
also saw that the U.S. and Soviet Union would quickly be drawn into irreconcilable conflict and eventually all out war. In 1946 he floated the notion that it might
be better, if war was to come, that it come while the U.S. was in sole
possession of atomic weapons. After the
Soviets inevitably developed them, any war would become a worldwide catastrophe of mutual annihilation. Critics charged that he was advocating a U.S. first strike. He insisted that he did not advocate it,
but had merely put forward his analysis of the situation and its likely
outcome. By the late Forties he had
completely distanced himself from this position.

After the
Soviets, as he predicted, tested their
first bomb in August of 1949 Russell adopted a position of demanding complete mutual nuclear disarmament and
measures to prevent other countries, including the United Kingdom from joining
the nuclear club.

Russell doggedly participated
in the growing Ban the Bomb movement, and became its most visible
spokesperson. His activities
particularly alarmed the United States which stepped up propaganda against him charging him with being pro-Communist. Given his long history of hostility to the
Soviet Union and his participations in demonstrations against the suppression
of the Hungarian Revolution and
other Eastern Block repression, the
charge was laughable.

Russell and his wife Edith, center, lead the anti-nuke march that led to his second imprisonment.

In
September 1961, at the age of 89, Russell was jailed once again inBrixton Prisonfor seven days after taking part inan anti-nuclear
demonstrationin London. He was charged,
ironically with breach of peace. The
magistrate offered to exempt him
from jail if he pledged himself to good
behavior, to which Russell replied: “No, I won’t.”

As the
sixties wore on he became a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. Concluding that
American action there was drifting toward genocide
in addition to his participation in street
demonstrations, in conjunction with French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre he established the Russell
Tribunal, also known as theInternational
War Crimes Tribunal which held
sessions in Stockholm in 1967 an ’68 concluded that the U.S. and its
allies had perpetrated a war of aggression in contravention of international
law, illegally targeted civilian populations, used weapon forbidden under
international treaty and law, abused prisoners, and committed
acts of genocide.

The Tribunal has subsequently been convened several
times to investigate cases including the Chilean Military Coup, the abuse
ofpsychiatry by various governments as a means of suppressing
dissent, Iraq and the Gulf War, Palestine.

Russell active in many causes right up to
his death, including opposition to what he regarded as Israeli aggression against
the Palestinians and their Arab neighbors and the Soviet suppression of Czechoslovakia.

He died of influenza at his home inPenrhyndeudraeth,Merionethshire, Wales
on February 2, 1970 at the age of 97. There
was no religious ceremony and his
ashes were scattered over the Welsh
mountains later that year.

No other public intellectual of the 20th Century or since has had such a profound influence on his times.